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FEATURE: Super Bowl offers business for `circuit girls'

Every year before the Super Bowl, Tammie Miller would gather her chinchilla coat and hop in a limo with her pimp. The host city, wherever it was, always offered a better supply of men than the lonesome highway in Long Beach, California, where she usually worked.

Miller was what's known as a "circuit girl," a traveling escort who, like any good entrepreneur, knows where the market is hot.

"We were in hotel lobbies, or out in front of the stadiums -- wherever there were major amounts of people," said the 37-year-old Miller, who quit the business two years ago.

This year, Arizona authorities have stepped up patrols, promising to sweep out circuit girls and their pimps before next Sunday's Super Bowl.

But if the women are any good, Miller said, police won't see them.

"They had no idea what I was doing," she said.

Circuit girls are part of a clandestine sex trade that depends on their ability to blend with the wealthy. Unlike local street hookers, they'll navigate the high-dollar crowd with ease, tapping men on the shoulder with little more than an innocent suggestion on their lips.

"I would walk up to them and ask them directions or some kind of help," Miller said.

In Jacksonville, Florida which hosted the Super Bowl in 2005, Roy Henderson, chief of narcotics in the Jacksonville sheriff's department, said his officers arrested about a dozen circuit girls after staff at one of the city's major hotels called to complain.

"I don't know if you can spot them," Henderson said. "A lot of times they're very attractive. They dress well, where typically your street walker is in blue jeans, flannel shirt, rough looking. Those are the ones we're picking up time and time again."

Henderson said policing prostitution at the Super Bowl clearly is not as important as monitoring security threats, but several officers will be assigned nevertheless. And he warns his counterparts in cities about to host the big game to be on the lookout.

"A lot of girls are advertising on the Internet, and it's a limited customer base that these girls had," Henderson said. "But you want to protect the innocent folks who don't want to be bothered by these individuals."

The Phoenix area, which already is known among hookers as a lucrative stop in the winter because of the snowbirds, is expected to be irresistible to sex workers this year.

The Fiesta Bowl already brought thousands of college football fans to the region at the beginning of January. And the Super Bowl was preceded by the Barrett Jackson car show and will be played on the final day of the FBR Open golf tournament, both major draws for wealthy, vacationing men.

Prostitutes who get caught face 15 to 180 days in jail in Phoenix, depending on how many offenses they have on their record.

Miller said it didn't occur to her to leave the circuit until police arrested her a few years ago.

"I was addicted to the adrenaline I got from it," she said. "The adrenaline of getting in and out of cars. The adrenaline of being one step ahead of the cops. The adrenaline of, `How much money can I make tonight?'"

Miller laughs now when she thinks what she used to be. A black embroidered cardigan and turtle neck have replaced the street clothes. She's removed her pimp's initials -- gold letters "M" and "V" -- from her front teeth. People used to call her "Miss Envy."

"A lot of my life is really fuzzy to me because of all the drugs I was doing," she said. "But of course it changed me."

Miller became a traveling circuit girl in her early 20s, after a pimp kidnapped her while she was working the streets of west Phoenix. The pimp -- his name is Vinnie -- stopped the car in Long Beach and told her to "get to work" as one of his 13 girls.

Miller said it wasn't until police arrested her a few years ago that she mustered the strength to get away. She thought Vinnie loved her, but he left her in jail for two months.

"I was just so crushed that he let me sit," she said.

That was when Miller said she found the DIGNITY House, a Phoenix-based rehabilitation program founded by a former prostitute and run by Catholic Charities in Arizona. The agency helped her find a job and put her up in a house.

With DIGNITY, Miller said she found her salvation. After two years, she is so free from the lifestyle that she hardly remembers the street words she used to sling back and forth with other hookers.

When she bumped into her pimp recently at a gas station, she did what she never could do before: She stood her ground.

"He came up and tapped me on the shoulder and said, `Hey, I'm going to California. Are you ready?' And I said `You know what, look, I'm not the person I used to be. I'm getting married, I don't need you.'"
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